He was a notably handsome man, tall and broad, with regular, impassive features and blue eyes exactly the colour of Arthur’s.  Save that his back was slightly rounded and that his closely-cropped hair was iron-gray, he showed little mark of his sixty years.  He seemed to me the very type of an English yeoman, not markedly intelligent outside his own speciality, and conservative to the point of fanaticism.  When I thought of trying to persuade him to forsake the usage of a lifetime and begin again in a foreign country under new conditions, my heart failed me.  Upstairs, before the looking-glass, I had had my doubts of the possibility of ever ousting the old Graham Melhuish; but those doubts appeared the most childish exaggerations of difficulty when compared with my doubts of persuading the man before me to alter his habits and his whole way of life.  It seemed to me that the spirit of Farmer Banks must be encrusted beyond all hope of release.

I mumbled some politeness in answer to his unanswerable opening, and started the one possible topic of the weather.  I was grossly ignorant of the general requirements of agriculture in that or any other connection, but any one knows a farmer wants fine weather for harvest.

He took me up with a slightly exaggerated air of relief, and I dare say we could have kept the subject going for ten minutes if it had been necessary, but he had hardly begun his reply before the three women for whom we had been waiting came into the room together.

When I met Mr. Banks I felt, at once, that I might have inferred him with nice accuracy from what I already knew of him.  Mrs. Banks was a surprise.  I had pictured her as tall and slight, and inclined to be sombre.  Anne’s hints of the romantic side of her mother’s temperament had, for some reason, suggested that image to me, and I was quite absurdly dumfounded for the moment when I saw this little, roundabout, dark-haired Frenchwoman, as typically exotic as her husband was home-grown, voluble, brisk despite the handicap of her figure, and with nothing English about her unless it were her accent.

Fortunately she gave me no time to display the awkwardness of my surprise.  She came straight at me, talking from the instant she entered the door.  “Discussing the crops already?” she said.  “You must forgive us, Mr. Melhuish, for being so interested in the weather.  When one’s fortune depends upon it, one naturally thinks of little else.”  She gave me her small plump hand with an engaging but, as it were, a breathless smile.  “And you must be starving,” she continued rapidly.  “Anne tells me you had no tea at all anywhere, and that the people at the Hall have been treating you outrageously.  So! will you sit there and Anne next to you, and those two dreadful children who won’t be separated, together on the other side.”

She was apparently intent only upon this business of getting us into our places about the supper-table, and not until I had sat down did I realise that her last sentence had been an announcement intended for her husband.